The
Occult World is an treatise on the Occult and Occult Phenomena, presented in
readable style,

by
an early giant of the Theosophical Movement.

Alfred
Percy Sinnett and his wife Patience were personally invited to join the
Theosophical

Society
by the founder of modern Theosophy,

Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky herself

Theosophists nowadays hesitate to use the
word “Occult” as it has been kicked around, adapted

and reworked to suit many purposes and
contexts.

A P Sinnett uses the word to describe the
study

of a deeper spiritual reality that extends
beyond

rigid rational thinking and the accepted

boundaries of the physical sciences.

The Occult World

By

A P Sinnett

Chapter 1

Occultism and its
Adepts

1

The powers with
which occultism invests its adepts include, to begin with, a control over
various forces in Nature which ordinary science knows nothing about, and by
means of which an adept can hold conversation with any other adept, whatever
intervals on the earth's surface may lie between them. This psychological
telegraphy is wholly independent of all mechanical conditions or appliances
whatever.[ See Appendix B. ] And the clairvoyant faculties of the
adept are so perfect and complete that they amount to a species of omniscience
as regards mundane affairs. The body is the prison of the soul for ordinary
mortals. We can see merely what comes before its windows ; we can take
cognisance only of what is brought within its bars. But the adept has found the
key of his prison and can emerge from it at pleasure. It is no longer a prison
for him-merely a d welling. In other words, the adept can project his soul out
of his body to any place he pleases with the rapidity of thought.

The whole
edifice of occultism from basement to roof is so utterly strange to ordinary
conceptions that it is difficult to know how to begin an explanation of its
contents. How could one describe a calculating machine to an audience
unfamiliar with the simplest mechanical contrivances and knowing nothing of
arithmetic§ And the highly cultured classes of modern Europe, as regards the
achievements of occultism, are, in spite of the perfection of their literary
scholarship and the exquisite precision of their attainments in their own
departments of science, in the position as regards occultism of knowing nothing
about the A B C of the subject, nothing about the capacities of the soul at all
as distinguished from the capacities of body and soul combined. The occultists
for ages have devoted themselves to that study chiefly; they have accomplished
results in connexion with it which are absolutely bewildering in their
magnificence; but suddenly introduced to some of these, the prosaic
intelligence is staggered and feels in a world of miracle and enchantment. On
charts that show the stream of history, the nations all intermingle more or
less, except the Chinese, and that is shown coming down in a single river
without affluents and without branches from out of the clouds of time. Suppose
that civilized Europe had not come into contact with the Chinese till lately,
and suppose that the Chinamen, very much brighter in intelligence than they
really are, had developed some branch of physical science to the point it
actually has reached with us; suppose that particular branch had been entirely
neglected with us, the surprise we should feel at taking up the Chinese
discoveries in their refined development without having gradually grown
familiar with their small beginnings would be very great.

Now this is
exactly the situation as regards occult science. The occultists have been a
race apart from an earlier period than we can fathom- not a separate race
physically, not a uniform race physically at all, nor a nation in any sense of
the word, but a continuous association of men of the highest intelligence
linked together by a bond stronger than any other tie of which mankind has
experience, and carrying on with a perfect continuity of purpose the studies
and traditions and mysteries of self-development handed down to them by their
predecessors. All this time the stream of civilization, on the foremost waves
of which the culture of modern Europe is floating, has been wholly and
absolutely neglectful of the one study with which the occultists have been
solely engaged. What wonder that the two lines of civilization have diverged so
far apart that their forms are now entirely unlike each other. It remains to be
seen whether this attempt to reintroduce the long-estranged cousins will be
tolerated or treated as an impudent attempt to pass off an impostor as a
relation.

I have said
that the occultist can project his soul from his body. As an incidental
discovery, it will be observed, he has thus ascertained beyond all shadow of
doubt that he really has got a soul. A comparison of myths has sometimes been
called the science of religion. If there can really be a science of religion it
must necessarily be occultism. On the surface, perhaps, it may not be obvious
that religious truth must necessarily open out more completely to the soul as
temporarily loosened from the body, than to the soul as taking cognisance of
ideas through the medium of the physical senses. But to ascend into a realm of
immateriality, where cognition becomes a process of pure perception while the
intellectual faculties are in full play and centred in the immaterial man, must
manifestly be conducive to an enlarged comprehension of religious truth.

I have just
spoken of the" immaterial man " as distinguished from the body of the
physical senses ; but, so complex is the statement I have to make, that I must
no sooner induce the reader to tolerate the phrase than I must reject it for
the future as inaccurate. Occult philosophy has ascertained that the inner
ethereal self, which is the man as distinguished from his body, is itself the
envelope of something more ethereal still --is itself, in a subtle sense of the
term, material.

The majority of
civilized people believe that man has a soul which will somehow survive the
dissolution of the body; but they have to confess that they do not know
very much about it. A good many of the most highly civilized, have grave doubts
on the subject, and some think that researches in physics which have suggested
the notion that even thought may be a mode of motion, tend to establish the
strong probability of the hypothesis that when the life of the body is
destroyed nothing else survives. Occult philosophy does not speculate about the
matter at all ; it knows the state of the facts.

St. Paul, who
was an occultist, speaks of man as constituted of body, soul, and spirit. The
distinction is one that hardly fits in with the theory, that when a man dies
his soul is translated to heaven or hell for ever. What then becomes of the
spirit, and what is the spirit as different from the soul, on the ordinary
hypothesis. Orthodox thinkers work out each some theory on the subject for
himself. Either that the soul is the seat of the emotions and the spirit of the
intellectual faculties, or vice versa. No one can put such conjectures
on a solid foundation, not even on the basis of an alleged revelation. But St. Paul was not indulging in vague fancies when he made
use of the expression quoted. The spirit he was referring to may be described
as the soul of the soul. With that for the moment we need not be concerned.

The important
point which occultism brings out is that the soul of man, while something
enormously subtler and more ethereal and more lasting than the body, is itself
a material reality. Not material as chemistry understands matter, but as
physical science en bloc might understand it if the tentacle of each
branch of science were to grow more sensitive and were to work more in harmony.

It is no denial
of the materiality of any hypothetical substance to say that one cannot
determine its atomic weight and its affinities. The ether that transmits light
is held to be material by anyone who holds it to exist at all, but there is a
gulf of difference between it and the thinnest of the gases. You do not always
approach a scientific truth from the same direction. You may perceive some
directly; you have to infer others indirectly; but these latter may not on that
account be the less certain. The materiality of ether is inferable from the
behaviour of light: the materiality of the soul may be inferable from its
subjection to forces. A mesmeric influence is a force emanating from certain
physical characteristics of the mesmerist. It impinges on the soul of the
subject at a distance and produces an effect perceptible to him, demonstrable
to others. Of course this is an illustration and no proof. I must set forth as
well as I am able--and that can but be very imperfectly-the discoveries of
occultism without at first attempting the establishment by proof of each part
of these discoveries. Further on, I shall be able to prove some parts at any
rate, and others will then be recognised as indirectly established, too.

The soul is
material, and inheres in the ordinarily more grossly material body; and it is
this condition of things which enables the occultist to speak positively on the
subject, for he can satisfy himself at one coup that there is such a thing as a
soul, and that it is material in its nature, by dissociating it from the body
under some conditions, and restoring it again. The occultist can even do this
sometimes with other souls; his primary achievement, however, is to do so with
his own.

When I say that
the occultist knows he has a soul I refer to this power. He knows it
just as another man knows he has a great coat. He can put it from him, and
render it manifest as something separate from himself. But remember that to
him, when the separation is effected, he is the soul and the thing put
off is the body. And this is to attain nothing less than absolute certainty
about the great problem of survival after death. The adept does not rely on
faith, or on metaphysical speculation, in regard to the possibilities of his
existence apart from the body. He experiences such an existence whenever he
pleases, and although it may be allowed that the more art of emancipating
himself temporarily from the body would not necessarily inform him concerning
his ultimate destinies after that emancipation should be final at death, it
gives him, at all events, exact knowledge concerning the conditions under which
he will start on his journey in the next world. While his body lives, his soul
is, so to speak, a captive balloon (though with a very long, elastic and
imponderable cable). Captive ascents will not necessarily tell him whether the
balloon will float when at last the machinery below breaks up, and he finds
himself altogether adrift; but it is something to be an aeronaut already,
before the journey begins, and to know definitely, as I said before, that there
are such things as balloons, for certain emergencies, to sail in.

There would be
infinite grandeur in the faculty I have described alone, supposing that were
the end of adeptship : but instead of being the end, it is more like the
beginning. The seemingly magic feats which the adepts in occultism have the
power to perform, are accomplished, I am given to understand, by means of
familiarity with a force in nature which is referred to in Sanskrit writings as
akaz.

Western science
has done much in discovering some of the properties and powers of electricity.
Occult science, ages before, had done much more in discovering the properties
and powers of akaz. In " The Coming Race," the late Lord
Bulwer Lytton, whose connexion with occultism appears to have been closer than
the world generally has yet realised, gives a fantastic and imaginative account
of the wonders achieved in the world to which his hero penetrates, by means of
Vril. In writing of Vril, Lord Lytton has clearly been poetising akaz.
"The Coming Race" is described as a people entirely unlike adepts in
many essential particulars--as a complete nation, for one thing, of men and
women all equally handling the powers, even from childhood, which- or some of
which among others not described- the adepts have conquered.

This is a mere
fairy-tale, founded on the achievements of occultism. But no one who has made a
study of the latter can fail to see, can fail to recognise with a conviction
amounting to certainty, that the author of "The Coming Race " must
have been familiar with the leading ideas of occultism, perhaps with a great
deal more. The same evidence is afforded by Lord Lytton's other novels of
mystery, " Zanoni," and "The Strange Story." In "Zanoni,"
the sublime personage in the background, Mejnour, is intended plainly to be a
great adept of Eastern occultism, exactly like those of whom I have to speak.
It is difficult to know why in this case, where Lord Lytton has manifestly
intended to adhere much more closely to the real facts of occultism than in
" The Coming Race," he should have represented Mejnour as a solitary
survivor of the Rosicrucian fraternity.

The guardians
of occult science are content to be a small body as compared with the
tremendous importance of the knowledge which they save from perishing, but they
have never allowed their numbers to diminish to the extent of being in any
danger of ceasing to exist as an organised body on earth. It is difficult again
to understand why Lord Lytton, having learned so much as he certainly did,
should have been content to use up his information merely as an ornament of
fiction, instead of giving it to the world in a form which should claim more
serious consideration.

At all events,
prosaic people will argue to that effect; but it is not impossible that Lord
Lytton himself had become, through long study of the subject, so permeated with
the love of mystery which inheres in the occult mind apparently, that he
preferred to throw out his information in a veiled and mystic shape, so that it
would be intelligible to readers in sympathy with himself, and would blow
unnoticed past the commonplace understanding without awakening the angry
rejection which these pages, for example, if they are destined to attract any
notice at all, will assuredly encounter at the hands of bigots in science,
religion, and the great philosophy of the commonplace.

Akaz, be it then understood, is a force for which we
have no name, and in reference to which we have no experience to guide us to a
conception of its nature. One can on)y grasp at the idea required by conceiving
that it is as much more potent, subtle, and extraordinary an agent than
electricity, as electricity is superior in subtlety and variegated efficiency
to steam. It is through his acquaintance with the properties of this force,
that the adept can accomplish the physical phenomena, which I shall presently
be able to show are within his reach, besides others of far greater
magnificence.

2

Who are the
adepts who handle the tremendous forces of which I speak ? There is reason to
believe that such adepts have existed in all historic ages, and there are such
adepts in India at this moment, or in adjacent countries. The
identity of the knowledge they have inherited, with that of ancient initiates
in occultism, follows irresistibly from an examination of the views they hold
and the faculties they exercise.

The conclusion
has to be worked out from a mass of literary evidence, and it will be enough to
state it for the moment, pointing out the proper channels of research in the
matter afterwards. For the present let us consider the position of the adepts
as they now exist, or, to use the designation more generally employed in India, of " the Mahatmas." [ Mahatma -Great Soul, or Great Spirit,
derived from Maha and Atma.]

They constitute a Brotherhood, or Secret Association, which ramifies all over
the East, but the principal seat of which for the present I gather to be in Tibet. But India has not yet been deserted by the adepts, and from
that country they still receive many recruits. For the great fraternity is at
once the least and the most exclusive organization in the world, and fresh
recruits from any race or country are welcome, provided they possess the needed
qualifications. The door, as I have been told by one who is himself an adept,
is always open to the right man who knocks, but the road that has to be
travelled before the door is reached is one which none but very determined
travellers can hope to pass. It is manifestly impossible that I can describe
its perils in any but very general terms, but it is not necessary to have
learned any secrets of initiation to understand the character of the training
through which a neophyte must pass before he attains the dignity of a proficient
in occultism. The adept is not made: he becomes, as I have been constantly
assured, and the process of becoming is mainly in his own hands.

Never, I
believe, in less than seven years from the time at which a candidate for
initiation is accepted as a probationer, is he ever admitted to the very first
of the ordeals, whatever they may be, which bar the way to the earliest decrees
of occultism, and there is no security for him that the seven years may not be
extended ad libitum.

He has no
security that he will ever be admitted to any initiation whatever. Nor is this
appalling uncertainty, which would alone deter most Europeans, however keen
upon the subject intellectually, from attempting to advance, themselves, into
the domain of occultism, maintained from the mere caprice of a despotic
society, coquetting, so to speak, with the eagerness of its wooers.

The trials
through which the neophyte has to pass are no fantastic mockeries, or mimicries
of awful peril. Nor, do I take it, are they artificial barriers set up by the
masters of occultism, to try the nerve of their pupils, as a riding-master
might put up fences in his school.

It is inherent
in the nature of the science that has to be explored, that its revelations
shall stagger the reason and try the most resolute courage. It is in his own
interest that the candidate's character and fixity of purpose, and perhaps his
physical and mental attributes, are tested and watched with infinite care and
patience in the first instance, before he is allowed to take the final plunge
into the sea of strange experiences through which he must swim with the
strength of his own right arm, or perish.

As to what may
be the nature of the trials that await him during the period of his
development, it will be obvious that I can have no accurate knowledge, and
conjectures based on fragmentary revelations pictured up here and there are not
worth recording, but as for the nature of the life led by the mere candidate
for admission as a neophyte it will be equally plain that no secret is
involved.

The ultimate
development of the adept requires amongst other things a life of absolute
physical purity, and the candidate must, from the beginning, give practical
evidence of his willingness to adopt this. He must, that is to say, for all the
years of his probation, be perfectly chaste, perfectly abstemious, and
indifferent to physical luxury of every sort. This regimen does not involve any
fantastic discipline or obtrusive asceticism, nor withdrawal from the world.
There would be nothing to prevent a gentleman in ordinary society from being in
some of the preliminary stages of training for occult candidature without
anybody about him being the wiser. For true occultism, the sublime achievement
of the real adept, is not attained through the loathsome asceticism of the
ordinary Indian fakir, the yogi of the woods and wilds, whose dirt
accumulates with his sanctity--of the fanatic who fastens iron hooks into his
flesh, or holds up an arm until it is withered. An imperfect knowledge of some of
the external facts of Indian occultism will often lead to a misunderstanding on
this point.

Yog Vidya is the Indian name for occult science, and it is
easy to learn a good deal more than is worth learning about the practices of
some misguided enthusiasts who cultivate some of its inferior branches by means
of mere physical exercises. Properly speaking, this physical development is
called Hatta Yog, while the loftier sort, which is approached by the
discipline of the mind, and which leads to the high altitudes of occultism, is
called Raya yog. No person whom a real occultist would ever think of as
an adept, has acquired his powers by means of the laborious and puerile
exercises of the Hatta yog. I do not mean to say that these inferior
exercises are altogether futile. They do invest the person who pursues them
with some abnormal faculties and powers. Many treatises have been written to
describe them, and many people who have lived in India will be able to relate curious experiences they
have had with proficients in this extraordinary craft.

I do not wish
to fill these pages with tales of wonder that I have had no means of sifting,
or it would be easy to collect examples; but the point to insist on here is
that no story anyone can have heard or read which seems to put an ignoble, or
petty, or low-minded aspect on Indian yogeeism can have any application
to the ethereal yogeeism which is called Raya yog, and which
leads to the awful heights of true adeptship.